122 Book Reviews © koninklijke brill nv, leiden, 2�16 | doi 10.1163/15685276-12341413 Mayanthi L. Fernando The Republic Unsettled: Muslim French and the Contradictions of Secularism. Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 2014. 313 pp. ISBN 9780822357483 (pbk.) On 7 January 2015 France was quite literally unsettled, as twelve people were massacred at the offices of the satirical newspaper Charlie Hebdo and four more in a kosher supermarket in Paris. People around the world expressed their soli- darity with the victims by using the hashtags #jesuischarlie and #iamcharlie, and attempts to diagnose the Republic’s current predicament abounded in the media. For those who want to move beyond facile headlines (of civilizational value conflict, the attack on freedom of speech, etc.), Mayanthi Fernando’s The Republic Unsettled provides an in-depth and ethnographically grounded analy- sis of the French predicament and of the Muslim French and the Contradictions of Secularism in particular. As the title of the book suggests, Fernando avoids opposing Muslims to French secularism, as is often done, but rather situates what she terms “Muslim French” within enduring tensions within French secularism and republican citizenship itself. A longstanding debate in the French context has been over how to name its Muslim population. Several authors have argued that the shift from Islam en France and Musulmans en France to Islam de France and Musulmans de France signaled a progressive integration of the Muslim popu- lation into the Republic. By choosing the neologism “Muslim French” rather than the more conventional term “French Muslims,” Fernando signals a more critical approach — “a wish to destabilize standard notions of both France and Islam” (p. 15). Fernando is careful to state that the “Muslim French” desig- nates not all those who identify or are identified as Muslims living in France, but “women and men committed to practicing Islam as French citizens and to practicing French citizenship as pious Muslims” (p. 13). The book is based on ethnographic research extending over a ten year period, and the richness and vividness of the ethnographic material presented is one of its great strengths. The sections called Field Notes One, Two, and Three each take us to a different moment and location that allows Fernando to unpack her original arguments and analysis. Although this is not explicitly spelled out, Fernando successfully uses debate and contestation as moments when the structuring logics and sensibilities of French republicanism and sec- ularism become exposed and available for anthropological analysis. Fernando importantly takes issue with French exceptionalism, which construes laïcité as so particular to the French context that it is virtually untranslatable to secularism. She rightly notes that “there exist striking convergences between